On September 14, SF Contemporary Music Players open their 2019-2020 season with a stunning assembly of forces for the world premiere of a new, concert-length, site-responsive work by Bang On A Can founding composer Michael Gordon with special guests Roomful of Teeth, and Splinter Reeds. More...

SFEMF announces its 20th Anniversary Festival dedicated to groundbreaking electronic music. With one evening of fixed media multi-channel sound works and three nights of live performances featuring a diverse cadre of internationally renowned and emerging composers, the festival will begin at Envelop SF, a next-generation immersive audio venue and continue at Brava Theater Center with live performances Friday through Sunday. Saturday evening artists: John Weise, Dohee Lee, and Marc Kate More...

Doors That Only Open in Silence (open participation, non-hierarchical workshop in free improvisation)

The monthly series of improvisation research at Temescal Arts Center continues. Bring your instrument or come to listen. No advance notice needed — just show up. Small groups will be randomly assembled from submitted names immediately before each group plays. We try to keep transition time between groups at a minimum. Over by 10pm. It's free. If you want to contribute, bring snacks and drinks. More...

Sharon Tate Fetus ExplosionDeadpanning familiar horrors of the human condition, served up as forthright lo-fi songs reminiscent of Noh Mercy, Sarah Lockhart's charm is a sonic sort of whipped topping soothing the nose cut off to spite the face of the human race.https://sharontatefetusexplosion.bandcamp.com

Shatter PatternJulia Litman-Cleper entangles us in bodily electronic alienation. Since sensory organs are one step from "knobs" interfacing us with external substance, now is the time to seize the means of production. Gaze into your shatter, rearrange your dials, previct all landlords, and empty the mind jail.http://soundcloud.com/waxy-tomb | http://www.shapedthought.com/

Kit Clayton (Orthlorng Musork/Cycling '74)Open fist anarchist who can slap your frowning smile like a skipping stone across the rising oceans to a far horizon, Clayton is founder and inventor of Cycling '74/Jitter and Tamarack infoshop in Oakland. Clayton's music is marked by the gravitational pull of its unlimited breadth and well.... you'll have to close your knowing mouth and jump to learn its depth.http://www.musork.com/o_jkc.html

GlochidsHe's already got a purge for your misguided Black Flag FOMO this WED, don't go there... listen instead to the Glochids edit of only the good parts from "Damaged." It only takes a few minutes. Then leave the misremembered past in the dust, and come clean to the Peacock Lounge for the bite of your actual here and now.https://glopuntia.bandcamp.com/album/black-flag-damaged-glochids-edit More...

Christina Braun and Tom Nunn perform “Deep States,” a set of 8 pieces for dancer and original experimental instruments. Each dance features a particular state of consciousness or circumstance and instrument.

Christina Braun is a lifelong dancer and prolific choreographer. Tom Nunn is Christina’s long term improvisational art mentor. Christina's solo dance works with composer David Samas have been recently presented by Safehouse Arts, the LAB, the Oakland Museum of California and the Asian Art Museum. As SF Butoh LAB, Christina has produced Butoh dance symposia, performances, and workshops. Tom has designed, built and performed with experimental musical instruments since 1975, always with a focus on recycled/re-purposed materials, to create a unique voice in improvised music. His years of work with Christina Braun have brought a rich visual and dramatic focus to his music. He has participated in several Bay Area festivals with Christinba, and others such as the High Zero Festival in Baltimore, Sound Symposium in Newfoundland, and AK07 in New Zealand. More...

Soundwave Festival kicks off with a special dance party curated by The House of Malico "Twerk 4 Mother Earth: Throwing It Back & Forth” featuring genre bending DJs and queer, safe(r) spaces at El Rio.

Twerk 4 Mother Earth is an​ independent dance party series which will connect with the Soundwave Festival 9 theme of "Time" by traveling through three decades of dance music with genre bending DJ’s: Fela Kutchii, Namaste Shawty, Onmommas, and Red Corvette will produce past, present, and future soundscapes that make the body move. More...

This is a 2 part event! First a workshop for a touch synth/analog controller, then a show!

Workshop: DIY Electronics: The Pipsqueak by Mroztronium4pm - 6pmPaypal $70 to mroztronium@gmail.com to reserve your Pipsqueak, please include your full name, and "Proarts Workshop" in paypal message, thanks! Deadline for registration is the 13th of Sept.

Broken Shadows with Tim Berne, Chris Speed, Reid Anderson & Dave KingSunday, September 22, Joe Henderson Lab6:00pm & 7:30pm$30Named for one of Ornette Coleman’s most evocative compositions, this all-star project honors the Coleman legacy along with the music of Coleman’s fellow Fort Worth native reed players Dewey Redman and Julius Hemphill, featuring the wildly inventive saxophonists Tim Berne and Chris Speed, and the Bad Plus rhythm section of bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King. Debuting as a band in January 2017 for the Konceptions Music Series at Brooklyn’s Korzo, the band is a remarkably balanced vehicle for performing Coleman’s work, approaching it with fearless experimentation, deep grooves, and wicked humor. More...

"We Edit Life" is an evening of audio-visual collage in two parts, featuring Vicki Bennett’s "Notations", a film for live improvising musicians, performed by electronic music duo Blectum from Blechdom, as well as a screening of Bennett’s film The Mirror. Since 1991, British artist Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) has worked across the field of audio-visual collage, and is recognized as an influential and pioneering figure in the still-growing area of sampling, appropriation and cut-up techniques of found footage and archives. Working under the name People Like Us, Bennett specializes in the manipulation and reworking of original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film and radio. More...

Brooklyn, NY based sound artist/composer c, honing a unique vision for the vocalist’s role in jazz and improvised music, is joined in duo performance and conversation by "stalwart of the new-jazz movement" pianist/composer Myra Melford, from across the Bay, in Berkeley. Co-presented with The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, as the first double-program in its Fall 2019 In Common Writers Series, supported by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. More...

San Diego-based Mexican flutist Wilfrido Terrazas will join forces with Bay Area bass legend Lisa Mezzacappa in a unique clash of improvising talents. Terrazas and Mezzacappa are both energetic and resourceful improvisers, and they have played together before in Los Angeles and Banff, Canada, but this will be their first full duo concert. More...

Experience the vitality of Bay Area music making in all its forms at SF Music Day, the Bay Area’s free daylong music festival in downtown San Francisco, presented by InterMusic SF. From chamber music to jazz, contemporary works to global traditions—SF Music Day brings together virtuoso musicians from across the Bay, with musical sounds that span continents and centuries.

Resident is a monthly electronic audiovisual open mic event started in 2017. It is held on the 2nd Tuesday of the month at The Laundry. The Laundry event space is casual and cool, and the community you'll find is like no other for aspiring electronic musicians in Bay. No judgments, no bullshit, just positive support and openness to new ideas. More...

Jon Leidecker: "United Feedback Plus: A Retroactive Manifesto for the Early Decades of American Electronic Music" Artist and scholar Jon Leidecker traces the history of modern artificial intelligence back to the chaotic electronic feedback circuits of early electronic music pioneers. Leidecker traces commonalities in the works of Louis and Bebe Barron (who scored the 1956 film Forbidden Planet), David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros, the members of the Sonic Arts Union (Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma), and their European contemporaries Eliane Radigue, Pietro Grossi, Jaap Vink, and Roland Kayn. This event is part of a series of Digital Alchemy Talks at Design By Cosmic, probing the intellectual and ideological histories of art and technology. More...

Sat 10/12 8:00 PMSF Live Arts @ St Cyprian's Church [Rova returns to the SF Live Arts series for the first time since fall 2017; the concert will feature several premieres, all composed by members of the band. Rova’s Bruce Ackley has been commissioned to create a work dedicated to longtime SF Live Ar]

Rova ( Bruce Ackley, Steve Adams, Larry Ochs, Jon Raskin) returns to the SF Live Arts series for the first time since fall 2017; the concert will feature several premieres, all composed by members of the band. Rova’s Bruce Ackley has been commissioned to create a work dedicated to longtime SF Live Arts assistant-director, community activist, friend and extraordinary artist, Marlene Aron. .. Provisionally titled Woven, the work centers around two of Aron’s most powerful works: Weep at the Beauty of her Stones and Ground, the Brown Earth Accepts Everything: Forest Prayer, and Woven in Time, Woven in Time, We Become — both paintings from 2016. Ackley’s work imagines the equal-sided shape corresponding to Rova’s 4 voices, and the detailed texture of the paintings’ surfaces, and their colors, informing the variegated quality of the sounds the quartet will create. More...

Rova Saxophone Quartettet (Larry Ochs, Jon Raskin, Steve Adams and Bruce Ackley) returns to The Back Room in Berkeley for the first time since fall 2017; the concert will feature several premieres, all composed by members of the band. Love playing here where the audience is welcomed with comfortable couches, cool hig chairs in the back and no bad seat in this intimate BYOB venue. Laid back.. but the music won't be. More...

FACE OF A STRANGER (1977), a restored feature film by San Francisco filmmaker and musician David Michalak. Tonight’s premiere will feature a new score by the internationally acclaimed pianist, Thollem McDonas. Selected Film-Frame prints will be on view in the lobby and the show will open with a short set by Rova’s Bruce Ackley. More...

Avishai Cohen Quartet/Wadada Leo Smith Golden QuintetFriday October 25, 7:30pm$25-55SFJAZZ celebrates a half-century of the iconic label, with nights in Miner Auditorium and the Joe Henderson Lab featuring ECM’s greatest artists. Named with initials standing for “Edition of Contemporary Music,” founder Manfred Eicher’s Munich-based imprint has represented the leading edge of innovation for five decades and over 1600 individual releases, blurring lines between genres and championing both established masters and young visionaries.

A double bill of modern trumpet greats with former SFJAZZ Collective member Cohen playing music from his last two ECM releases with his working quartet, and avant-garde trumpet icon Smith presents the world premiere of his Appassionata Suite dedicated to Anita Hill, MLK Jr., and more. More...

Vijay Iyer Trio$40-105SFJAZZ celebrates a half-century of the iconic label, with nights in Miner Auditorium and the Joe Henderson Lab featuring ECM’s greatest artists. Named with initials standing for “Edition of Contemporary Music,” founder Manfred Eicher’s Munich-based imprint has represented the leading edge of innovation for five decades and over 1600 individual releases, blurring lines between genres and championing both established masters and young visionaries. More...